I was visiting the website staredit.net and found some interesting stuff there. The thing is, I am not really sure about it and I was wondering if it is a good site to register to or is it a bad idea? I don't know... I read some stuff and it seems the forum has had some hard times... And I mean HARD times. Mostly from trolls and the like and I understand almost all websites have that problem early on, but I want your opinions on the site. Of course, I do love you guys here on Campaign Creations.

So, what do you think? should I give them a try or no?

EDIT: By the way, I also saw some familiar faces and thought that it was connected with Campaign Creations. Is that true or are you guys totally seperate from each other?

pretty sure the website's not connected with cc but there has been so much inter-site drama that who the fuck knows at this point.

SEN is about the same as CC in terms of activity and they tend to focus on SCBW projects (unlike cc which doesn't seem to have any active developers with project threads), so if you want to branch out to another part of the community go ahead. If you dont like it you can just leave. It's not like this is a life changing decision we're talking about, you don't need a consult to divine the correct course of action. I imagine you would just use the same reasoning behind registering for CC as you would for any other forum: you found something that interested you. So if something interests you, go for it

SEN is/was possessed by a dominant local mindset that was extremely anti-custom content for a long time, which lead to the formation of Maplantis, predominantly by modders. I don't think any really official bad blood existed between the sites, but even I was met with a lot of undue hostility from mappers there. Not enough to be concerned about, but enough to know that the majority of people who never tried modding were willfully ignorant of it and chose to avoid it due to being unable to face their own inadequacies as designers and developers. Nonetheless, Maplantis lived a short life and was eventually assimilated back into SEN. I know someone from SEN gave me a much more in-depth story than that, but I cannot remember it. I believe there was some personal drama but nothing even remotely on the scale of CC's .com incident or SA's Xaran 16 year old puberty rampage incident. At the end of the day, the people responsible for producing large projects in the SEN outlet only produced a very few handful of largely incomplete projects, vanished, or went elsewhere. SA never garnered any new traffic post-warcraft 3 and Magic became too busy with fighting the nonstop flow of chavs on his property to pursue his undying dream of making another new amazing website, and attempts to redirect BW traffic elsewhere such as Hercanic's site universally failed because no true, cohesive modding community has existed for the game since 2003. That leaves us with CC which, while barren of forum activity, has a number of lurkers who I know to be building significant projects for a number of titles.

Thanks for the info. By the way, sorry about double posting, I sometimes hit the quick reply button very quickly and practically forget and by the time I post, I realize hours later I just did that and yeah, usually I hit the edit button for some things like that, but I guess I forget. I'll work on that.

IskatuMesk wrote:and attempts to redirect BW traffic elsewhere such as Hercanic's site universally failed because no true, cohesive modding community has existed for the game since 2003.

Correction: Modcrafters was never officially released, as it was still under early development when PQ's free time was eaten up by new employment. Other than word of mouth, a post at SEN, and my signature, no other efforts were made to advertise. I was actually kind of surprised we had as many people as we did. I was pretty vigilant about deleting spambots and old 0-post accounts I didn't recognize, so all 91 of those registered on the forum are actual people who were interested in SC modding. Not too shabby for 2009.

IskatuMesk wrote:So PQ was the only one working on the site? What are you going to do with it now?

PQ and I were the only official team members. He did coding, I did whatever else.

The plan was to build a front page that used the wiki and forum as a backend, fetching content from them and displaying it in a custom, streamlined manner. CampaignCreations does this with its front page and the News forum here, allowing us to manage who has posting rights through existing software.

PQ coded the same sort of news system on Modcrafters. In addition, we planned for the tabs PLAY, LEARN, and CRAFT to pull from specific categories on the wiki. PLAY would have been a mod download database, LEARN a tutorial database, and CRAFT a tool and resource database.

To add to any of these databases, you would create a wiki page, use a designated template that the database would draw from to summarize your entry, and assign the page to the appropriate category. Since it's a wiki page, you can add more info outside of the template on the rest of the page, with wiki links to anything you want. Users could jump to the wiki page from the database to see all the additional content.

For example: Program downloads like FireGraft and DatEdit in CRAFT could inter-link to appropriate tutorials in LEARN. If you wanted to provide extensive stats and descriptions for units and buildings in your mod, you would have the freedom to do so on the wiki. The idea was that by using a wiki as a backend, the community could build up, refine, and update the content as time passed.

When PQ had to retire, I didn't have the technical knowledge to implement the full concept. I forget what was going on for me at the time, but I know I considered scaling the project down to just the wiki and forum, without all the fancy aesthetics that the databases would bring to those browsing.

Right now, I am preserving the site as an archive. Many people contributed awesome content, so I don't want to see it just disappear into the night. Unfortunately, the webhost has forced a version upgrade of PHP, so the wiki hasn't worked for a long while because it needs to be updated to work on the higher version of PHP. Bleh.

IskatuMesk wrote:CC has a lot of registrations that aren't bots but never actually contributed anything. I don't take that kind of statistic into account for anything.

I wouldn't use the memberlist as a metric for CC, either; we're too old. With MC, though, I only expected a couple dozen people, at most, since we were in very early development and I did almost no advertising. Take away me, PQ, you, the generic user Modcrafter that I made, and the 13 people who never made a post (e.g. WarGiant), and that's 74 other people who popped in and posted at least once. I was happy to know there was more interest in SC modding in 2009 than I anticipated.

A pity very little of that equated to actual production, though. I suppose that is the way it is with everything. At this point if you had any content left I think you should merge it with CC. I think that is what should have been done from the start. Splitting up sites so much has always been an issue with this community.

I've forgotten everything I once knew about BW. Some people (outside of the community) making campaigns and such still come to me for questions and I just can't help them anymore.